


New Life

by SwoodMaxProductions



Category: Dead Cells (Video Game)
Genre: Adoption, Angst with a Happy Ending, Creating Life, Gen, Headcanon, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Literal Sleeping Together, POV Multiple, Parental Instinct, Paternal Instinct, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team as Family, baby blob......, did I mention baby Beheaded?, goo child, just babey......., still growing in a vat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-07
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-17 19:00:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28604874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwoodMaxProductions/pseuds/SwoodMaxProductions
Summary: A look into the Collector and the Beheaded: their pasts, their relationship, and their trauma.Translation: I wanted to write about goth science dinosaur dad and his dumbass slime son
Relationships: The Beheaded & The Collector (Dead Cells)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	New Life

**Author's Note:**

> Son boy son boy son boy son boy

Sensation. He was alive. His coagulating essence gathered, and so did his awareness. His eye, a golden pupil in a glow of the same purplish-red as the Stone that enabled his birth, opened for the first time.

His first sight was two very different men. One was a twisted thing, blue-skinned and rail-thin, looking like he hadn’t rested in years. The other was an imposing figure, his face partially obscured by a crowned helmet.

“—project… immunity… vessel for your mind… from your cells...“

“—how soon… Malaise is—“

He slept. Gaining consciousness was tiring work.

~~~

The Astrolab was kept locked at all times. The Royal Alchemist’s handful of lab assistants were forbidden from conversing with him outside of his work, by order of the king. His usefulness to the King’s desires for power and immortality were the only thing distinguishing him from the poor souls crowding the prisons and dungeons. Even that was debatable— there had been six prior Royal Alchemists… 

Gone were the days when he could be outside of the castle, when he could put research into a cure for the Malaise in secret. The King had his method for ascending to immortality, and he wouldn’t stand for his alchemist to be engaging in anything else.

He was alone. The only living creature he truly had was the homunculus. 

It shifted in its little vat, blinking up at him. It was only two weeks old, and small enough to hold in the palm of one hand, were he to… take it out and hold it... He shook his head. He didn’t even know if Marcia or the children were even still alive, but… gods, it was so small. Not even the hell he’d been put through could destroy his parental instinct. Sometimes he even caught himself speaking to it. He supposed he was doing all he could not to go mad.

He knew it was for the King. That it  _ was _ him. But the little eye gazing back at him was nothing like the King. This was an entirely new creature, a blank slate. Like a baby. And he was going to…

“I’m sorry,” the Alchemist whispered, touching the vat and trying not to cry, “I’m so sorry…”

~~~

They said the Royal Alchemist was dead. In a way, they were right. Dr. Agrippa Tiiko was gone. But not killed in the explosions that destroyed half the Astrolab. Those merely created an escape route. What emerged was the Collector— a broken husk.

Or so he had thought.

The little homunculus had escaped, and its replicant body decapitated somewhere in the journey— but this couldn’t kill it. Gazing out of the eldritch fire that substituted a head was that same glowing eye. He would know it anywhere.

He was known as the Beheaded, and, ironically, it was he that finally killed the tyrannical King, even threw off the bastard’s attempts to reabsorb him. And the Collector was  _ proud. _

For all intents and purposes… he was his  _ son. _

He looked over at his prodigal creation— asleep, curled up under a threadbare blanket beside the Blacksmith’s young apprentice, also sleeping. Adorable.

The Collector had never dreamed that he would ever have hope again. But here he was. All that was left to do was the manufacture of the Panacea. And he had help. He had…  _ care. _ Thanks to the people of the Havens, hope had finally come.

And somewhere in the back of the Collector’s mind, Dr. Tiiko began to rise from his grave.

**Author's Note:**

> My headcanon name for the Collector comes from Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, the occultist, Great Agrippa the Victorian children’s character to foreshadow standing up to wrongs, and Tycho Brahe, pronounced TEE-ko, a Danish astrologer, astronomer, and alchemist.


End file.
